The epification of augmentations

First off – a new epic wilderness and all quests including the alternative walkups are all epic (GH). While there are some random elements (encounters to the wilderness) it seems as they kept most of the old ones where they were.

Second – everything gets augments and the normal, hard and elite named loot continues. This is good and bad. Augments can seriously improve mid level to high level loot in a significant way but as you’ll notice with below mid gear such as waterworks – it’s quite pointless.

I say this because the augmentation guys are in GH and you won’t have access to it until you reach level 10 or something like that. Which means that if you pull a ML2 item with augment slots you won’t be able to augment them anyways – unless someone sells theirs on the AH.

Also – the low end aguments are so-so. Will adding +1 to charisma do something significant to a sorc that can craft a better item themselves and how long will you be using that low end gear? True – there are some okay ‘low level’ augments like Feather falling (ML 4) or heavy fort (ML 8) but you won’t be sticking them on ML 2 augment gear.

The benefit seems pretty minor to start augmenting everything in sight. Again – I’m not against it – I just don’t see a significant benefit of augments in the first 4-5 levels. It is true however that a lot of content have been changed – I saw some deleras (ML 7) content with augments and there’s always tangleroot. So augments will gradually become more and more useful as you get into heroic GH – where the level 14 gear with augment is actually really okay. More importantly – it shows a huge differense between some content and other content. Why should anyone bother with redfen un augmented gear when you can now find good augmented gear in things like Deleras (at least at that ML).

To me it looks like Turbine have to do a complete overhaul of all their stuff or else no one is going to run certain things. The cat is definately out of the bag now.

There is some issues with the dragon armor sets tho. Dragon armor together with its helmets are okay, but they’re not really that good. It seems that the helmet adds several different ability point version – such as one with int, dex, strength, con etc and together with the armor adds a relic enhancement that stacks with everything else.

For black it’s doublestrike, white 50 HP and blue 15 spellpower. But other then the black the white and the blue are kind of meh armor.

If you compare it to the epic red there’s no guard effect. Simply superior lighting, blue augment, spell pen 9, potency 80 and greater arcane lore. Not major arcane lore or superior. Even worse – other items comes with several multi-colored augment slots and the blue doesn’t even come with purple.

There’s just no reason for anyone to strive for the set unless it also adds something that makes it better. It would be much better if they added a purple slot in the blue (makes sense since you would be able to add some spell power to it) and then a colorless (for all the dragon armors btw), spell augmentation 9 or something like a major lore. Make it desired.

Make people want to run epic to get the set. And add a guard effect. Red dragon armor shouldn’t be the most desired dragon armor – all of them should.

There’s a lot to like about update 17 and some (again) that makes little sense. Turbine have no problem throwing in some gear with tons of augment slots but in other instances (like dragon armor) makes meh stuff. Those dragon armors should be desired.

Instead they’re one of those things you could consider on an alt, in case of.